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New Yorkers are used to the many public art sculptures that decorate NYC’s vibrant streets and parks. But this fall, a new set of statues coming to the Meatpacking District may set a whole new bar for the city’s public art scene.
One hundred life-size elephants will appear in the Meatpacking District from September 6 to October 2024 as part of “The Great Migration,” a global fundraising effort to uplift Indigenous voices and motivate the human race to share space with their animal neighbors.
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“The Great Migration” relies on the collaboration between Indigenous artisans, contemporary artists, and cultural institutions, all of whom work together to raise money to fund human-wildlife coexistence projects. The funds are also used in biodiversity conservation and protection efforts of migratory animals that traverse land, skies, oceans and seas.
Each elephant is created by The Coexistence Collective, a group of 200 indigenous artists from the Bettakurumba, Paniya, Kattunayakan and Soliga communities of India’s Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, Tamil Nadu. Over the past five years, the collective has made sure each elephant is perfectly detailed to give life to each animal sculpture, drawing from both their own experience and generational knowledge of nature and wildlife.
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The elephants are made from lantana camara, a flowering plant and one of the world’s most invasive weeds. When lantana grows in India’s Protected Areas, animals are forced out of their homes and into urban areas, which only exacerbates human-wildlife conflict. By constructing these elephants out of lantana, the weed’s presence in protected areas decreases, and animals are able to roam freely in their own homes.
As the Indian population has doubled to 1.4 billion in the last 30 years, so has the animal population, including rhinos, lions, tigers and elephants. The Great Elephant Migration hopes to emphasize this growing coexistence between humans and wildlife, showcasing the beautiful ways they share space and thrive alongside each other.
The Great Migration currently stands in Newport, Rhode Island at Cliff Walk, but will make it’s way to The Meatpacking District in NYC from September to October this autumn. Later, the elephants will march all the way to Miami, then Montana, and finally end their migration in Los Angeles, California.